Finding treasures among the weeds
‘Indiana Jones’ of botanists found a rare flower last seen in Maryland 100 years ago
After finding a rare flower last seen in Maryland when Teddy Roosevelt was president, Wes Knapp excitedly headed home to share his breaking botany news with his wife.
“I’m pretty sure I came home sweaty and tired and told her we found the Solidago rupestris” —a bright yellow flower that most others would know as the riverbank goldenrod — “and she said, ‘That’s great, can you take out the garbage?’ ” Knapp recalled.
It can be a tough road for those who see treasures where others see weeds. But to hear Knapp talk about his work is to listen to a man describing his little slice of heaven every time he gets to walk “out in the woods and get my vitamin D” as a botanist and ecologist for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources.
Knapp slowly walked the banks of the Potomac River in Montgomery County recently to get back to where he had made his find in September.
He was constantly scanning, his eyes high and low — “that’s the harbinger of spring, just a few inches tall and amongst our earliest flowering plants,” he said, and “you got spicebush starting” up here.
As he inched closer to the exact spot, Knapp, who lives in Hurlock, Md., ticked off a mental list of virtual high-fives he received in his inbox when his buddies heard what he had found.
“One from Alabama put it on Facebook and tagged me, because someone tagged him and said, ‘This is a cool story,’ and a person from out West sent it to me,” he said. “I dunno. People get excited, which is good. People do care about nature.”
He made nature his life’s work after a horrible day in an organic chemistry class during his sophomore year at Catawba College in North Carolina.
It was a nice spring day, he said, and he had spent three hours in a lab where a reaction hadn’t worked.
“I realized then I couldn’t live my life in a lab,” he said.
Knapp went outside to the steps of the science building to regroup in the sun and bumped into a professor.
“He said, ‘Do you want to workstudy in the herbarium?’ ” Knapp re- membered. “And I didn’t know what it was, but I said yes.”
Michael Baranski, Knapp’s former professor, said the rediscovery of the riverbank goldenrod in Maryland is “one of those neat things that keeps us all moving forward.”
“We’re glad to see that element of our biodiversity is still around,” Baranski said.
Knapp said his brother Randy “told me I’m the closest thing he knows to Indiana Jones.”
A New Hampshire native, Knapp came to Maryland in 2001to take his first, and so far only, job with the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
Of field work, he says: “Though it’s, like, sexy — the idea of all this great field work — there’s a lot of ticks, there’s a lot of biting insects, there’s a lot of sun, dehydration. It’s really challenging. I’ve had Lyme (disease) twice.”
The goldenrod was just across the river in Virginia, and given how seeds can travel by wind gusts and water flows, Knapp thought it had to be in Maryland, too.
He and a team started a search along two islands in Maryland’s portion of Great Falls Park and, during a second search, they found a patch of about 50 goldenrods near Carderock, just west of Bethesda.
“As soon as I walked up, I said, ‘There it is.’ It had the right feel, the right gestalt, the right look,” he said, describing the unique shape of the plant’s leaves.
Knapp said he thinks that nature isn’t always here for humankind’s benefit: “Sometimes nature is here for itself and we’re just a component of nature.”
“I don’t understand the difference between the last rhinoceros being shot and the last population of this goldenrod being wiped out,” he said. “What’s the difference?”